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San Francisco is getting another spirits producer: Top Hat Distillery.

Furthermore, thanks to some recent legislation, the Bayshore project hopes to become the city’s first spirits tasting room.

Top Hat Distillery is the brainchild of partners Lisa Lowitz and Tyler Morris, who have been working on their little pet project for the last year and a half.

Morris is a former chef, and the couple has a two-year-old daughter. “We wanted something we could do as a family project,” says Lowitz.

Top Hat Distillery centers around the still (pictured), a 150-gallon, copper and steam-jacketed Vendome Copper & Brass Works pot still built by hand in Kentucky. It features a special shaped whiskey helmet (the namesake “top hat”), plus a gin basket for infusing aromatics, and a separate reflux column.

Top Hat also has a 400-gallon, steam jacketed mashtun, built by Jesse Lupo of Trident Welding and Stills in St. Albans, Maine. The mashturn will be used to create the grain mash that is used in the pot still.

So what does Top Hat Distillery plan to produce?

“We’re going to do a lot of things,” says Lowitz. “But really, the number one thing for us we’ll be starting with is rye whiskey.”

The 100-percent rye whiskey will be accompanied by other small-batch spirits: a bourbon, a California-grown smoked barley whiskey (essentially an American version of a Scotch), gin, white rum, and seasonal fruit liqueurs.

“We’re realty trying to source in California, though rye is not easy to come by,” she says. There will be both unaged (white) versions of the whiskeys, as well as the barrel-aged versions.

Top Hat Distillery received city approval back in February 2014, and are currently awaiting federal approval as they finish the build-out of their 2,500-square-foot space. Federal permitting is hoped to come through in the next four to five months.